shadows
by thir13enth
Summary: "You can't be with the light," she had said. "But you can be with me." Jeltear.


**Friends! I didn't even realize it, but with this posting, I have officially catalogued 500,000 words on Fanfiction! Not sure if that's a proud accomplishment or not, but I guess it's good time to be happy for all the support I get from readers and reviewers. I probably would have never made it this far if I hadn't been getting reviews from day one, story one.**

 **Anyway, I've been hardcore on the Jerza ship since the Tower of Heaven arc, but I wanted to branch out a little bit and give one of my favorite Fairy Tail characters some variety. So…Jeltear, it is—nothing too crazy…yet.**

 **This oneshot came out a bit darker than I expected, but hopefully you don't mind! Plus there's a small angsty heated moment toward the bottom. Anyway, please enjoy!**

* * *

Ultear didn't remember very much in her life.

With the Arc of Time and the fulfillment of her ultimate goal, everything that had happened to this point would disappear into a dimensional crevice.

So what did it matter to her how many lives she had taken? What did it matter to her how many sacrifices she had personally made turning herself into the least humane human known to mankind?

However, there were a few things that she would never forget—no matter how many forbidden spells and lost magic she had would test on herself.

The first was her hatred for her mother for leaving her to such a life. Throwing her into a land of desolate snow with nothing but the desire for truth, in the form of experiments and unwanted treatments of her body. A life where every part of her was violated. A life, where even twenty years later, her skin—the very pale skin that continued to remind her who her wretched mother was—still remembered the gloved fingers running over her abdomen and the biting metal restraints along her wrists and ankles.

But the second was a salacious love for the blue-haired face-tattooed man that she had chosen from his boyhood herself. When her Zeref-lusting eyes first cast their onyx sight on the child's strong yet empty gaze, she knew that he had to be the one. She held him under the guise that the fleeing ignorance and entering wisdom was that of the great Black Wizard when in actuality, _she_ was the one that nurtured him into a man, holding him at her breast to feed. And oh, she took great pleasure at his suckling.

Hate and love set birth to her universe, and concurrently kept her in the middle of killing herself in her misery and becoming an immortal god that controlled the dominoes that held the world together.

Then, at Tenrou Island, her world collapsed.

After encountering both rejection from her beloved immortal deity and from her body that was too scared to turn a blade on itself, she had thrown herself into the ocean. And when she emerged from the purifying salts of the water, she thought she had properly baptized herself and had become a new person—one that valued life, even her own, and one that would repent for the sins that she could never atone for.

But then Meredy suggested that they cut _him_ loose, and ask him to join them.

Her heart had skipped then. Her body remembered him then.

That was when she realized that she had not been purified at all, and that her pants were damp with desire, not from the salty sea.

Nothing could stop her then, and she agreed to Meredy's idea. She nodded along to the fact that they were going to apologize to him for all the trouble they had gotten him into, but then behind the pink-haired girl's back, she licked her lips and mentally relished the idea of seeing _him_ again.

And when she broke him free from the chains, he looked up at her, recognizing that _she_ was the one freeing him and giving him another chance at life beyond a death sentence.

In that moment, he looked at her with the precious eyes she hadn't seen since he was last in her manipulative grasp. He rose his chin and looked up at her power and glory with submissive eyes, as if he suddenly realized that _she_ had been his Zeref all this time and that he had been drinking _her_ milk from the very start.

In that moment, her heart sang a high note that it hadn't reached in a long time, and she felt her chest ache from the old melody, a sudden warm desire building from soft and deep within her.

Then she saw his lips, parched and dry—she would have kissed them right then and there without shame to moisten them with her welcoming tongue—except that she noticed that the last thing the lips that she so desired had done was say the name of a certain scarlet-haired woman that Ultear could neither love or hate.

Erza Scarlet.

The Queen of Fairies, too, didn't fit in Ultear's binary world of love and hate—which to Ultear was the most upsetting thing about the Fairy Tail mage.

Ultear could not love Erza because she was the one that draw his attention away from Ultear. Ultear could not love Erza because Erza represented everything that Jellal wanted that Ultear lacked. Ultear could not love Erza because each and every time when taken to the test, Jellal would choose her over Ultear, even while she dangled everything he could possibly want—power, fortune, herself—within arm's reach.

Yet Ultear could not hate Erza either. Hating Erza would mean hating something that made Jellal who he was. Ultear could not hate Erza because if she ever unintentionally voiced her opinion to him, he would disagree with her, and the difference between the two of them would widen. Ultear could not hate Erza because doing so would betray her beloved Jellal.

Ultear could neither love nor hate Erza—and the funny thing was, this was because of _him_.

She could not admire the graceful and independent fighting stance of the elegant woman, knowing that _he_ was probably cherishing her more in his gaze. And she could not be envious that he kept Titania in his sight more than her, knowing that he would judge her for how she regarded _his_ beloved.

Ultear found it even more upsetting that despite all this, Jellal would never let himself love the woman that he loved. He choose instead to cast the woman in a pure white lights—one that rivaled Ultear's fair white skin—and banish himself to the shadows so that he could never reach for her without coming apart.

He would only allow himself to long for her.

Knowing this, Ultear thought to herself, one day, just one day, he would awaken from his dark nightmare of longing, and he'd let her fill the empty shell in his heart—just like he had more than ten years ago when she told him she was Zeref. She longed to fill the space and feel his heart beat in rhythm to hers.

And that day was now.

Now, when she found him in her arms.

"You can't be with the light," she had said. "But you can be with me."

When the implicit confession rolled off her lips, he had met her eyes with a confused dark chocolate gaze. She had smiled widely—the widest she had ever smiled since he had last allowed her in—before stealing a long and hungry kiss off his nervous lips.

He had shuddered, seeing the silvery trail of her spit stretch between their partly-opened lips. He had looked up at her again, with those submissive wide-open eyes that she had loved, silently asking her if what they were doing was right.

Of course, it was, she had told him through downcast eyes, trailing a commanding finger from his jaw to his chest as a low and seductive growl emerged from her throat.

And now, she found herself in his arms.

Their mouths were locked together and their breath had already become one. Neither had reason to let go of the other—both had been longing for too long. Her hands were entangled in the rough tussles of his hair, and his hands wrapped tightly around her waist.

She pressed herself hard against him, splitting her legs to sit further into his lap and molding her curves as best as she could into the space between them. She wrapped both arms around his head, pushing his face into her neck and moaning when she felt his hot breath whisper against her skin and the bite of his hard cold teeth sink in.

In that moment, she remembered when she first met him and knew that she wanted to make him hers. She remembered bestowing the responsibility of her envisioned future on him, and she remembered that she first loved his broad back and shoulders, firm jawline, and narrow hips before she began to love his pure yet tainted and masochistic soul.

"More," she quietly kissed onto his raw and moist lips.

He obliged, and her heart skipped another beat when she felt his warm hands come up and around the back of her waist to slowly cup her. She gently nudged his hand over to the top button of her shirt. His finger hooked onto the cloth, lightly tickling the skin underneath, before roughly ripping off the fastens and exposing her white milky skin to him.

Maybe it was seeing her pure and fair skin, but the spell suddenly broke, and he tore his lips from hers, looking straight into her eyes with fully conscious and awakened eyes.

With this, Ultear knew her pleasure was up.

And then she realized—the only reason why she was in his arms was not because he wanted to be with her. Indeed, she was only in his arms because he still had it in the back of his mind that he could not be with the light and could only condemn himself to tasting the shadows of his same shade of darkness.

She would always be in the shadows. Of Zeref, when he grew into loving the dark. Of Erza, when he grew into loving the light.

And he was just suckling at her breast again, while she nurtured him without thanks.

* * *

 **Angsttttt…**

 **Whatcha think? Let me know!**

 **(To note, I was listening to Blumenkranz from the Kill la Kill soundtrack…which probably influenced how this story eventually turned out.)**

 **thir13enth**


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